Effects of training parents in dialogic book-sharing: The Early-Years Provision in Children?s Centers (EPICC) study

Shared picture-book reading is well-recognized as beneficial for children's early language development, especially where "dialogic book-sharing" techniques are used. Possible benefits of dialogic book-sharing to other aspects of child development have been little investigated, and it has not been widely studied in European populations. We conducted a randomized trial of dialogic book-sharing in Children's Centers in the UK, with parents of 2- to-4-year-old children, hypothesizing that it would benefit parenting and a range of child developmental outcomes. Intervention group parents (n = 110) received 7, weekly, group training sessions, and control parents (n = 108) the usual center input. Parenting and a range of child outcomes (language, attention, executive function, social development, and emotional-behavior difficul-ties) were assessed on 3 occasions: before, after, and 4-6 month following intervention. For all study outcomes we compared controls with each of the Intention-to-Treat population and the per-protocol population (participants attending the requisite number of sessions); and, for primary child outcomes only, the population of parents who engaged well with the intervention. There were substantial benefits of dialogic book-sharing training to parental behavior during book-sharing, especially for sensitivity and cognitive scaffolding. For all 3 sets of comparisons there were small-medium effects of on child expres-sive language, and, for the per protocol and engaged populations, similar sized effects on child receptive language and attention. There was no evidence of benefit of dialogic book-sharing for the other areas of child development; we suggest that specific intervention components need to be added to standard dialogic book-sharing to effect change in these areas.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )